Book Review: Post-Missionary Messianic Judaism

The book review below is something I wrote that was published in The South African Baptist Journal of Theology, 2010, volume 19. The book reviewed is Mark Kinzer's Post-Missionary Messianic Judaism: redefining Christian engagement with the Jewish people, published by Brazos Press in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2005 (ISBN 9781587431524). Kinzer works at the Messianic Jewish Theological Institute.

Post-Missionary, in Kinzer’s jargon, does not suggest an end for missions. Rather, Kinzer promotes a post-missionary form of Messianic Judaism which reaches out to Jews in a different manner to the traditional missionary approach. Instead of converting Jews to Christianity and instructing them to abandon “all things Jewish”, Kinzer promotes helping Jews to discover the Jewish Messiah within their Jewish faith, its practices, history, scriptures—and among the practising Jewish community.